First light, and the starlings name themselves
           one by one,
wind swelling like an ocean, leaf to dagger-pointed leaf
through the willow, river birch casting forked shadows beneath the heat.

Everything but me seems to have its instruction: the hare
shuffling through the brush to its burrow, noseeums rising
in droves, each slat of the venetian blinds an intonation of light.

But this is where I keep my allegiances,
in this room of no sleep so thick with silence
that it claims its own configuration,

that thin cord of luminance beneath my bedroom door
     a stropped edge of steel;
the image the window holds most clear when I look through it,
my face afloat in the glass—

another false image imposed on our backyard,
another false image
floating freely on the reflection of the waking world.